Fertile Ground - New technology in China turns desert into land rich with crops

China has reportedly developed a technology that is able to transform desert lands into arable soil that could grow crops and natural vegetation. 

 

Lead in:

1. What challenges do deserts usually have when it comes to growing crops?

2. What countries or regions do you associate with large deserts?

3. How do you think technology could help transform a desert into farmland?

4. Do you think changing natural environments like deserts is a good idea? Why or why not?

 

Before watching: What do these words mean?

crop

method

region

oasis

substance

retain

soil

transform

fertile

 

 

 

Now, look at these synonyms of the words above. Can you recall the word they are a synonym of?

 

plant

practice

area

garden

material

keep

earth

change

fruitful

 

What is the difference in meaning?

crop    /     plant

method     /     practice

region      /      area

oasis       /     garden

substance      /      material

retain       /       keep

soil     /      earth

change     /    transform

fertile   /   fruitful

 

True, False, Doesn't Say?

1. The area is very cold.

2. The desert is an ideal place to support vegetation.

3. The scientists planted all the crops that are growing in the area.

4. The transformation of the land has happened relatively quickly.

5. The researchers have found something inside plants that they put into the sand.

6. The method of turning sand into soil the researchers have discovered is cheaper than other methods.

7. The experiment has been copied in other countries.

 

Further questions
1. What kinds of crops can be grown in these areas?
2. How long does it take for crops to get established?
3. What exactly can the magic paste do?
4. What are the long-term aims of the researchers?

Use vocabulary in a sentence

Watch:

Fertile Ground

Vocab:

Turning desert into rich land

The Last Supper

Ask your partner

1.Which food have you just eaten?

2. Did you enjoy it?

3. Are you hungry right now?

4. What will you eat for lunch today?

 

 

5. What do you like to have on toast? What do you like to have with toast?

Positive of negative or neither?

I can't stand it

I can't help eating more and more

It tastes a bit odd

It's fresh

It's healthy and wholesome

It's flavoursome

It's bland

It's quite dry

It's too hot

It's an acquired taste

It's full of carbs

It's helps you sleep

It's refreshing

It's high in sugar

It's high in protein

The meat is tender

The meat is touch

You can tell it's been made from a packet

You can tell it's been prepared with care

It's my secret recipe

It's unbelievable spicy

It burns your tongue

It's scrumptious

It's a good quick fix

It's convenient

It's very satisfying

It melts in your mouth

It smells better than tastes

It's low in fat

It's high in fat

It's not the real thing

It makes me want to throw up
It needs to cool down first

It's very filling

It's a bit bland

It's too sweet

stand

protein

tender

prepared

tell

help

tough

secret

cool

tongue

unbelievably

high

absolutely

Flavour

fix

full

healthy

hot

quite

easy

fresh

acquired

satisfying

bland

helps

down

bit

throw

fat

better

low

tastes

mouth

 

I can't ______ it

I can't _____ eating more and more

It ______ a bit odd

It's _____

It's _______ and wholesome

It's _______some

It's ______ and boring

It's ______ dry

It's too _____

It's an ______ taste

It's ______ of carbs

It ______ you sleep

It's ______ and refreshing

It's _____ in sugar

It's high in _____

The meat is _____

The meat is too _____

You can _____ it's been made from a packet

You can tell it's been ______ with care

It's my ______ recipe

It's ______ spicy

It burns your _____

It's ______ scrumptious

It's a good quick ______

It's convenient and _____

It's very filling and ______

It melts in your ______

It smells ______ than it tastes

It needs to cool _____ first

It's a _____ bland

It's ______ in fat

It's high in _____

It makes me want to ______up

 

Ask your partner

1. How many eggs do you eat per week?

2. What kind of sauces go best with eggs?

3. What are eggs called in your first language?

4. Which of your favourite foods include eggs in the ingredients?

5. Could you ever give eggs up completely?

Ask your partner

1. Do you have access to a kitchen at the moment? 

2. How much of your day do you usually spend in the kitchen?

3. Do you enjoy doing the dishes? What makes it more fun?

4. Have you ever smashed a plate of a glass on purpose? Why?

5. Which appliance in the kitchen is the most important?

the fridge

the stove and oven

the dishwashing machine, 

the hot water jug.

the toaster

the microwave

the blender

10 Kitchen idioms


1. Everything but...

2. Hey! ...?

3. That's the way

4. my head is on

5. One big

6. I have a memory

7. don't put all your ... in one ...

8. too many cooks

9. I have too / so many things

10 I have to put that idea on the

like a sieve
kitchen sink
spoil the soup
chopping block
eggs (basket)

the kitchen sink
back burner
what's cookin'
cookie crumble
on the boil
melting pot

Where does this food come from?

Favourite sauces, dressings, and toppings

vinegar. soy sauce, mustard. maple syrup, mayonnaise, tomato ketchup, jalapeno sauce, salsa verde, chipotle, hollandaise, teriyaki, wasabi mayo, aioli. sriracha, chili sauce, Thai sweet chili, olive dressing, chocolate sauce, strawberry sauce, balsamic vinegar, cheese sauce (white sauce), custard, gravy...   

What do you like to put on....

lettuce

vanilla ice cream

crackers

sausages

steak

salmon

french fries

pancakes

asparagus

Arrange a dinner party together. It's the last meal of your lives.

200 Countries 200 Years

1 .What is this graph showing basically?

2. What do the two axes represent?

3. What does the size of the country bubble show?

4. What does the colour of the bubble show?

5. Which countries are doing better? Which a re doing worse?

6. True or false? - the graph shows that in general the higher the income of the population is, the better its health is.

Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

Watch:

200 Countries 200 Years


Language Focus

True or false?

1. In 1810, the average life expectancy in the UK was below 40 years old.

2. The Industrial Revolution caused life expectancy to fall

3. The Great Depression caused life expectancy to drop dramatically

4. After World War One former colonies gained independence.

5. When former colonies gained independence their life expectancy rose.

6. Global life expectancy has been flat since World War Two.

7. In the future life expectancy is expected to fall. 

200 Countries 200 years                                                And     but     here     now 

Visualization is right at the heart of my own work too. I teach Global Health, and I know to have / having the data is not enough. I have to show / tell  it in ways people both enjoy and understand. ____ I'm going to try something I've never done again / before, animating the data in real space, with a bit of technical assistance from the crew.

So _____ we go, first an axis for health, life expectancy from / of 25 years to 75 years. And down here an axis for wealth, income per person 400, 4,000, and $40,000. So down here is poor and sick, and up _____ is rich and healthy.

_____ I'm going to show you the world 200 years ago / before, in 1810.

____ come all the countries Europe brown, Asia red, Middle East green, Africa South of the Sahara blue, and the Americas yellow. ____ the size of the country bubble means / shows the size of the population.

And in 1810 it was pretty crowded down there, wasn't / was  it? All countries were sick and poor, life expectancy was below 40 in all countries. ____ only the UK and the Netherlands were slightly better off, _____ not much / very.

____ ____, I start the world.

The Industrial Revolution makes countries in Europe and elsewhere / others  move away from the rest. _____ the colonized countries in Asia and Africa, they are stuck down there.

_____ eventually / later the Western countries get healthier and healthier.

____ ____ we slow down, to show the impact of the First World War, and the Spanish flu epidemic, what / that’s a catastrophe.

___  ____ I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s, and in spite of / because of the Great Depression, western countries forge on towards greater wealth and health. Japan and some others try to follow, ____ most countries stay / keep down _____.

____, after the tragedies of the Second World War, we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948.

1948 was a great year, the war was over, Sweden topped the medal table at the Winter Olympics, and I was born. ____ the differences between / within the countries of the world were wider than ever. United States was in the front, Japan was catching up, Brazil was way backward / behind, Iran was getting a little richer from oil, but still / also had short lives. And the Asian giants, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, they were still poor and sick down _____.

_____ look what is about to happen, here / there we go again.

In my lifetime former colonies gained independence and then finally they started to get healthier and healthier and healthier. ____ in the 1970s then countries in Asia and Latin America started to catch up with the Western countries. They became the developing / emerging economies, some in Africa follows, some Africans were stuck in civil war, and others hit by HIV.

____ ____, we can see the world today in the most up-to-date statistics.

Most people today live in the middle, ____ there's a huge difference at the same time between the best-off countries and the worst-off countries. ____ there are huge inequalities within / between countries. These bubbles show country averages, ____ I can split them. Take / For example China, I can split it into provinces, there goes Shanghai. It has the same wealth and health as Italy today. And there is the poor inland province Guizhou, it is like Pakistan, ____ if I split it further / more, the rural parts are like Ghana in Africa.

____ yet despite / due to the enormous disparities today, we have seen 200 years of remarkable progress, that huge historical gap between the west and the rest is ____ closed / closing. We have become an entirely new converged / converging world, ____ I see a clear / small trend into the future with aid, trade, green technology, and peace. It's fully possible / probable that everyone can make it to the healthy wealthy corner.

Well what you've just seen in the last few minutes is a story of 200 countries showing / shown over 200 years and beyond / after. It involved plotting 120,000 numbers, pretty great / neat uh?

The Math Behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. Natalya St. Clair illustrates how Van Gogh captured this deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work.

Lead in

Draw some flowing water. How can you represent something fluid, with static lines?

Lead in: What do you think makes this picture so well loved?

Look at the title:

“The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ by Natalya St. Clair:

What do you think the article will say about the picture?

 

Read the article and find out:

One of the most remarkable aspects of the human brain is its ability to recognize patterns and describe them. Among the hardest patterns we’ve tried to understand is the concept of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics.

The German physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “When I meet God, I’m going to ask him two questions: why relativity and why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks.

In June 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted the view just before sunrise from the window of his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he’d admitted himself after mutilating his own ear in a psychotic episode.

In “The Starry Night,” his circular brushstrokes create a night sky filled with swirling clouds and eddies of stars.

Van Gogh and other Impressionists represented light in a different way than their predecessors, seeming to capture its motion, for instance, across sun-dappled waters, or here in starlight that twinkles and melts through milky waves of blue night sky.

The effect is caused by luminance, the intensity of the light in the colors on the canvas.

The more primitive part of our visual cortex, which sees light contrast and motion but not color, will blend two differently colored areas together if they have the same luminance.

But our brain’s primate subdivision will see the contrasting colors without blending.

With these two interpretations happening at once, the light in many Impressionist works seems to pulse, flicker, and radiate oddly.

That’s how this and other Impressionist works use quickly executed, prominent brushstrokes to capture something strikingly real about how light moves.

Sixty years later, Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov furthered our mathematical understanding of turbulence when he proposed that energy in a turbulent fluid at length R varies in proportion to the five-thirds power of R.

Experimental measurements show Kolmogorov was remarkably close to the way turbulent flow works, although a complete description of turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics.

A turbulent flow is self-similar if there is an energy cascade.

In other words, big eddies transfer their energy to smaller eddies, which do likewise at other scales.

Examples of this include Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, cloud formations, and interstellar dust particles.

In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw the eddies of a distant cloud of dust and gas around a star, and it reminded them of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

This motivated scientists from Mexico, Spain, and England to study the luminance in Van Gogh’s paintings in detail.

They discovered that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures close to Kolmogorov’s equation hidden in many of Van Gogh’s paintings.

The researchers digitized the paintings and measured how brightness varies between any two pixels.

From the curves measured for pixel separations, they concluded that paintings from Van Gogh’s period of psychotic agitation behave remarkably similar to fluid turbulence.

His self-portrait with a pipe, from a calmer period in Van Gogh’s life, showed no sign of this correspondence.

And neither did other artists’ work that seemed equally turbulent at first glance, like Munch’s “The Scream.”

While it’s too easy to say Van Gogh’s turbulent genius enabled him to depict turbulence, it’s also far too difficult to accurately express the rousing beauty of the fact that, in a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind, and to unite his unique mind’s eye with the deepest mysteries of movement, fluid, and light.

 

Go to Ted Lesson:

The math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

1. Who admitted van Gogh to a mental asylum?

2. What is an energy cascade?

3. What is turbulence?

4. What is relativity?

5. What is the Hubble telescope?

6. What is amazing about van Gogh's 1889 Starry Night painting?

Discuss

1. Is it important that Van Gogh seems to have accidentally represented turbulence? Why?

2. If we can just take photographs or films of fluid things, why bother trying to represent them through painting or drawing? 

Descension

1. One key ability of the human brain is recognizing _________ and being able to describe them.
2. Among the most difficult patterns scientists study is ________ in ________ dynamics.
3. The physicist _________ once said he would ask God about _________ and _________.
4. In June 1889, _________ created a painting based on the view from his room in an asylum in _________.
5. In The Starry Night, _________ brushstrokes form a sky full of swirling _________ and starry eddies.
6. Impressionist artists showed _________ in a new way, capturing its _________ in scenes like water or the night sky.
7. This visual effect comes from _________, meaning the intensity of _________ in the colors used.
8. In 1941, _________ suggested that energy in turbulent flow depends on the _________ power of length.
9. In turbulent flow, an _________ cascade occurs, where larger eddies pass energy to _________ ones.
10. Researchers later found that the luminance patterns in Van Gogh’s paintings resemble _________, especially during times of _________ agitation.

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette | The Sunflowers

lead in:


Who painted this?

If I give you "unsolicited" advice, does it mean the advice is...
A) poorly researched?
B) unasked for?
C) not from a lawyer?
D) not advice that I follow myself?

Discuss

1. Should people who suffer from mental illness take medication or try to cope without it?

2. Is there a connection between artistic talent and mental instability?

3. How might the medication van Gogh was taking have actually been partly responsible for the Sunflowers?


Guide questions

1. According to the man, why should artists not take medication for mental health problems?


Kahoot Quiz

The Math of Starry Night